Oi oi, Most titles in the series didn't have choose-your-own-romance subplot. Awakening had it because the whole story was about kids coming back from the future. Fates had it because it was a popular feature in Awakening. There are like 14 other Fire Emblem titles that didn't have the capacity to matchmake. Stop pretending like that what was what the games are about. Even then, you had the ability to have a kid with your best friend's kid in Awakening or with your Older Brother in Fates, so it's not like the other titles were all exactly upstanding in regards to restricting said matches.

@davillain-: All I was saying is that saying that it's the "most interesting game since Alan Wake" is to ignore the fact that Alan Wake was only seperated from Control by a single title. It seems to imply that Quantum Break, in the author's opinion, is less interesting than Alan Wake. It wasn't my intent to disparage Quantum Break. I never actually played it (the 70 gig install side is a big ask for a PC port that had, admittedly, not a great reputation.)

If you enjoyed Quantum Break, then good! I'm glad.

"Control May Be Remedy Entertainment's Most Interesting Game Since Alan Wake"

What does that even mean? Alan Wake was two games ago. "Quantum Break was a let-down, but I promise this one will be good?"

This is such a bad article title. You might as well tell us that Avengers Endgame is the best Avengers movie since Infinity War or that this article is the best article you wrote since the last one. If you're just going back to the immediate past, then the comparison using since is meaningless.

Remedy makes interesting games. Well observed. However, observing the obvious is trite.

They also missed that the taxi cab had an ad for a airline called "Alpha Flight", which shares a name with the Canadian superhero team.

I mean, the moment they said it was a two part movie, we all knew he killed everyone. That's how a two movie arch with the reality ending artifact goes.

Rise and Fall is mediocre. It doesn't deserve an 8. It doesn't ruin a good game, but it doesn't make it much better. Arguably it makes the game a little bit worse, by throwing in clutter. Civ 6 has been plagued, from the start, by opaque design. You can learn the systems behind the game, but the game will not help you. It never explained adjacency bonuses, the policies have to be understood through trial and error to figure out what exactly each one means. The new loyalty system is no different. The game makes no effort to tell the player how to manipulate it-- either in your cities or others.

This sort of forced ignorance benefits titles like Dark Souls or Breath of the Wild, where discovery is encouraged and rewarded. However, in what is essentially a board game, not knowing the rules until you play the game is more frustrating than anything.

In addition, the governor system is a mess. Most of the bonuses are flak to get in your way. That each governor is a character (and each civilisation has the same characters) is unnecessary, and immersion breaking. I'm not saying there weren't black people in medieval England or women didn't rise to significance, like many might, but having a South East Asian Priest or a Mesoamerican ??? head up my cities in 2000 BC is unnecessary. My intelligence network are a names taken from culturally appropriate lists, as are my archeologists. Why give these characters statics faces and names?

The new civilisations seem just uninspired. Most of them seem like they're trying to go for a series first. Georgia is unnecessary. The Zulus, the Cree, the Dutch, the Mongols and the Koreans: we knew they were coming. I was expecting the Iroquois instead of the Cree, but a native civ none-the-less. Scotland has good music? The Mapuche likewise seem a poor choice in comparison to the Inca. The Dutch leader is spectacularly a poor choice: she did not manage policy for the Netherlands and oversaw the country during a decline into a state from which it will never return (I love the Dutch people and their country-- en ik spreek Nederlands ook-- don't get me wrong.) For a game about building empires, perhaps a Dutch ruler who actually ran the country at the zenith of their historical significance and not someone who oversaw their decline? After all, Rome isn't led by Valentinian III and China isn't led by Cixi. Wilhelmina's accomplishments are thus: she is well loved and she lived long. She is not Queen Victoria, Ghenghis Khan, Qin Shi Haung, Peter the Great or Alexander the Great. She isn't Gilgamesh or Frederick Barbarossa. In 100 years, you have to be a student of history or a Dutch school child to know who she was.

Also, the age system doesn't feel like it actually matters, which is maybe the most damning thing to say about any design choice.

I wouldn't buy the expansion unless you regularly play Civ. It is nothing to come home to.

@asnakeneverdies: I did, but if you can strip off all of the higher components and it doesn't have a qualitative difference on the analysis, then it's just garbage data. If a thriller is essentially the same as a sci-fi cyberpunk thriller, why write sci-fi cyberpunk at all? It's essentially meaningless at that point. This is the core argument that I don't feel you've satisfactorily addressed.

I mean, kudos. You're obviously very clever and well educated. So, it's not like I don't respect what you're writing. However, your claim that I don't know what genre means is wrong. I think the wider public can misuse words and I am not so much a democrat (not the political party) that I think popular usage overrides sense and reason.

I think I have made a compelling, if contentious and difficult to accept case, that a genre tag that tells the reader nothing about the work it describes is spurious. It would be like using an adjective that has no meaning. If I said .... Deus Ex was frumptactus and chemelfric, those words are indeed acting as adjectives, but mean nothing and therefore fair completely as adjectives-- they do not provide description.

@asnakeneverdies: if neither the parent genre nor the sub genre address the contents of the work beyond superficial trapping, then how is it the genre? If the only thing telling us qualitatively about the work is the sub sub genre, how is that not simply the genre?

@asnakeneverdies: i disagree with the conventional definition of genre, as applied to science fiction and similar genres. If a genre tells you nothing about what a book or show or game is about, and instead tells you about the aesthetic, then it isn't really a genre, is it? If you have to tack on another genre to explain what type of story it is, it isn't a genre, but a setting. If you have to say Cyberpunk noir or Cyberpunk thriller, it isn't a genre but a setting. First person shooter is a genre. Grand strategy is a genre. But historical grand strategy doesn't mean historical is a genre. A game set in the American civil war isn't a civil war. Samurai Warriors and Nioh aren't sengokus.

Tell me a catch all about the type of mechanics you find in the genre of cyber punk games, and I'll shut up right now. Tell me how all cyber punk games play on some fundamental level and I'll apologise right now.

First of all, Pondersmith is a fraud. I'm still waiting for him to make good on his Kickstarter for Mekton Zero. He's a fraud and all of his games are just capitalising on other people's ideas.

Second, this article is garbage. Your thesis statement is : "Why Cyberpunk 2077 Is So Important To The Genre And Modern Society" and yet the article doesn't really do either, especially not to satisfaction. The claim there is no "definitive cyberpunk game" is spurious. I take contention with the idea that any genre has a "definitive" incarnation in a single title. Does COD represent first person shooters better than DOOM or Quake? If there exists a "definitive" example of a genre, then it is a dead genre. At best, you can have the most well known titles from a genre. Besides, "cyber punk" isn't a genre, it's a setting. That said, Deus Ex is pretty well known: as is Shadowrun Returns. So anyway you can look at it, the thesis falls apart until the slightest examination.

This whole article is either an incompetent writer who can't even follow through on including the central premise of the article in the article or a fluff piece to capture clicks in wake of Cyberpunk's tweet. I present that as an either or, but it isn't really.